Restless Soul - Alex Archer [100]
“I’m coming back to Chiang Mai,” Annja said. “I’ll be leaving soon. Hey, you don’t need to yell at me.” She wanted to look through the antiques store below for…what? Maybe for any records of the smuggling operation or artifacts. Maybe for a list of names of people buying the relics or working for Lanh Vuong. Maybe a laptop or hard drive she could take with her and dig through later. Something to put the last pieces of the puzzle in place.
“Yes, I’m coming right back. Right away,” she told Pete when he pressed her to leave and to let the local authorities sort things out—not a “vacationing American archaeologist with a nose for trouble looking to get herself tossed in a foreign jail.”
“You can stop yelling. I’m heading back now,” Annja said.
Well, soon, she thought. A trip downstairs first. She considered calling the lodge to find Luartaro, again dismissing the notion because of the late hour. She considered calling the consulate or the embassy, too, as Pete had suggested, as well as Doug Morrell to see if a crew was on its way to Thailand to film the teak coffins.
Instead, she pushed the button to listen to Lanh Vuong’s messages. She figured she might learn just how many days ago he died based on the age of the messages. It was an old-style answering machine, with a cassette tape in it. She didn’t think they made those anymore. The tape was full.
There were nineteen messages, the first was five days ago, so he’d not been dead longer than that. Most of them were in Vietnamese, and she could pick out only a few words, not enough to yield anything useful. But there were four messages in English, all from the same man—Sandman, he called himself.
“I’m worried about you, old man,” Sandman said. The voice was scratchy and distorted because the tape had been used so much. “You haven’t returned a single call.”
Another message said, “I wanted to tell you this face-to-face, but you’re obviously not around. Something’s rotten inside.”
The next said, “Old man…pick up the phone. Are you there?”
The last was from the previous day. Sandman was worried about his friend and would have someone stop by to check on him tomorrow…which would be later that day. It was after midnight.
Annja paced in the tight confines of the room. She should leave—after a quick look downstairs—hop in the Jeep and return to Chiang Mai to tie up any loose ends with the authorities and the consulate. She shouldn’t cool her heels in a dead man’s apartment waiting for someone called the “Sandman.”
She left the apartment, turning off the lights as she went, stopping to look in the refrigerator and taking out a block of cheese and a bottle of ginger ale. The rest of the items looked either fuzzy with the first hints of mold or unidentifiable. She took the back staircase down, eating the cheese as she went. It was sharp cheddar, and it helped to cut the smell of Lanh’s corpse.
She retrieved a small flashlight from the Jeep. The back door to the antiques shop required a little work to open, and she managed to bypass the alarm—it was an older security device that anyone with a little thought could dismantle. She closed the door behind her and flicked on the flashlight.
A shiver coursed through her.
At the top of a hutch-style desk across a crowded and cramped back room sat a skull bowl.
30
The bowl was stoppered, and Annja held the base of the flashlight in her mouth as she worried away at the waxy seal. There were no voices in her head this time, just a desire to see what was inside.
Four more dog tags were stuck in an inch of dried blood. She pried the tags out and stuck them in her pocket and left the bowl sitting on the desk; it would be leaving with her, along with any others she found.
She squeezed past a bank of file cabinets. There was no computer out in the open in the office, or in the first three large drawers she opened, and so she suspected the old man kept all of his records on paper; he’d been from another era, after all. She stepped back and opened one of the